Christmas on Earth Continued Again and Again

— Maxime Rossi

16th January, 2019 — 2nd March, 2019

Press release

ENGLISH :(Français ci-dessous)

All that was left of my big brother was a bunch heavy rock mixtapes he had made in the late 80s, with hand made covers cut from magazines. I also got an empty metal box of Camel tobacco, that smelled like the wallpaper covering the walls of his room. Like the blast of loud music that was often playing in his room, I only remember the muffled vibrations passing through our common wall, but no melodies. Maybe it has something to do with the “gong effect” of the pioneer of modern mime, Etienne Decroux, the continuous movement of a sound in his absence, through memory.[1]

Maxime Rossi’s exhibition Christmas on Earth Continued Again and Again is a multi-layered aural and visceral experience that has evolved from several exhibitions by Maxime Rossi – at Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie, Serignan; Galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers and Fondation Fiminco – into an incredibly dense, complex and complete series of artworks. Conceived when the artist discovered a declassified FBI document outlining the investigation into the Kingsmen’s 1963 rock-and-roll record Louie Louie, the exhibition distills a time of puritanism and paranoia. Edgar J. Hoover, the fearsome director of the FBI, whose suspicious nature imagined the lyrics as obscene and pornographic had his federal agents spend months deconstructing the song searching for encrypted messages and developing many imaginary and artful re-interpretations of the hit song. The case of the non-existent obscenity (any confusion is easily resolved if you listen to the original lyrics) ended without prosecution. Ironically overlooked, the drummer yells “Fuck” when he drops his stick at the 0:54 mark.A perfect primary source for Rossi where the surreal, the revised, the collaged and modern music combine, the artist has formalised the evidence into an intensely layered exhibition around an artwork that uses artificial intelligence, behavioural algorithms and deep learning to create an ever evolving sound piece. Inspired by Raga (literally “colouring, tingeing, dyeing”) music from India and Pakistan that structures a melodic framework as a basis for improvisation, Rossi’s algorithm performs and evolves constantly as it reacts to the seasons, hour of the day and mood of the artwork’s location. Beginning with this impetus, Rossi employs the sound files of the psychedelic rock record he produced in 2017 as an artwork[2] with historical members of varying British groups such as Phil Minton, David Toop, Steve Beresford, Evan Parker and the 4 times Grammy award-winning artistic director Tom Recchion. The artist built the computer program that is connected to wi-fi and registers meteorologic information to arrange musical and lyrical passages while changing the tone, register, speed and melody according to the real-time data.

A second data chart of pre-recorded orgasm phases is incorporated to draw a parallel with climate change, incorporating humidity, temperature, and air pressure. “Considering the tongue as a blossoming sex organ”[3], Rossi uses the lyrical content of the soundscape to inform the “emotional libidinal structure”[4] of the AI algorithm. The augmentation of the singer’s voice informs a new pattern of speech: a flowery language, unadorned, oddly adolescent, obscene and narcissistic that mimics the blooming curves of ascension, climax and descent that we may see as questioning a perceived obscenity found in nature.

This melodic score meets our ears through prismatic speakers that diffract the sound at varying angles not unlike an optical prism deflects light into colours. This technology, still in a stage of theoretical development and not widely available, emits four signals (one for each season) through their unconventional forms beautifully rendered as transparent acrylic sculptures suspended from the ceiling.

Merging onto the walls is the lyrical component of the sound score found in the unrealised script for artist/film director Barbara Rubin’s (American 1945 – 1980) Christmas on Earth Continued from the late sixties. Close to Ginsberg’s circle, Warhol’s factory, Jonas Mekas and others of the avant-garde, her films have been called “sub-sub-sub-underground”[5] and “among the most radical ever made”[6]. Her 1963 film titled Christmas on Earth (titled after a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s poem A Season in Hell) depicts a sensory feast in two 16mm films projected one upon the other, explicit sexual content and whatever the viewer had playing on AM radio. IMDB calls it “performance art film about genital worshipping”[7]. Her sequel would have included some of the period’s most important collaborators and the cast and crew list become the material for the singers improvised lyrics.

The title of the Barbara Rubin counter-culture script was co-opted for the rock festival happening in London around the same time, sadly remembered as the last important concert that Syd Barret played with Pink Floyd. During this concert the band played a 30-minute rambling improvisation of Louie Louie. This epic financial failure of a concert due to permit problems, biting winter weather and a lack of publicity, was soon dubbed “the last gasp of the British underground scene”. Rossi would later use a photo taken at the festival by his collaborator David Toop for the cover of their album Dirty Songs.

Next to a certain paranoia, the concept of “blooming” becomes an important theme in the exhibition as we see this action running through the varying stages of orgasms, weather and emotional moods, perfectly represented by a single plant in an artist-made vase. A Night-blooming Cereus Jasmin that reverses the cycle of most known plants by blossoming at night to release its “empty cigarette pack” scent before retreating during the day. Its temperament alludes to the, mostly accepted, phasing of sex and rock-and-roll being activities of the night. As if alluding to the perversity of these activities, the flower will hide during the galleries opening hours.

In the very centre of the gallery is a large metal sculpture framing exquisite artisanal stained glass panels. Lifting text from the record sleeve of Dirty Songs the sculpture reads as meandering concrete poetry.

Even after they had fallen silent in the twinkling blue velvet of night, faint signals could be heard from distant stars: dirty planet, we gotta go.

The psychedelic and op art aesthetic casts the room in varying blue and purple hues echoing the colour charts of the orgasm data we are unconsciously, but invariably, hearing. Conveniently exhibited in the dead of winter the piece elicits a soft-nod to Seasonal Affective Disorder (one must love the acronym SAD).

The exhibition, in formidable Maxime Rossi style, is an intense and heavily loaded sensual experience thats counter-culture source material make it a heightened trip though a multiplicity of rich source material. Its continually generating algorithm only escalates this layering and collaging as if an aural game of cadavres exquis played by the most important underground participants of a post-peace period.